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How Windows 10 will change your workplace

Bold claim indeed.

But let us just examine what will be arriving in a couple of days, when Microsoft releases Windows 10 into the wild world outside the rarefied existence of the Windows Insider Programme.

Windows 10 has been in Preview with over 5 million insiders for many months and each ‘flight’ has introduced more and more of what will be available within the workplace very soon.

This is probably the most talked about, written about and widely commented on Operating System release ever and for that reason I don’t want to repeat things here.

So, I will limit myself to just one radical change that can and probably will change the face of your workplace. From the perspective of the IT Professional (that’s you!)

Users will have a great and far more productive experience and Windows 10 goes a very long way to Microsoft’s goal of more personal computing, especially as the operating system will be the same from tiny devices right up to the large conferencing system that is Surface Hub.

But the poor soul who will have to test, configure and deploy this magical new world for the users is the IT Professional, implementers that need to skill up quickly and develop skills to take advantage of all the new leaps in deployment, management and connectivity that Windows 10 brings.

So for my part I will pick the ability to utilise the Azure Active Directory features and an Azure AD account as your primary logon method and the new updating / deploying models, or Windows as a service.

Microsoft Azure is the all-encompassing name for Microsoft’s vast network of datacentres that provide public and private services to its customers. From Office 365, Intune, Azure IaaS, PaaS and many more including Azure RemoteApp which I have written extensively about and Machine Learning which is the remit of my colleague and fellow Technical Evangelist Andrew Fryer.

The backbone of this broad range of services is, of course Identity and ensuring security, authentication. Authorization and accounting. This is achieved in Azure by the use of Azure Active Directory. This article is not intended as a lesson in Azure AD since there are already many resources to assist you with that. (MSDN, TechNet, Azure help files)

Currently Azure AD can connect you to your Microsoft Azure services and other online services as well as provide directory synchronisation and full federation including Single Sign On (SSO) and password write back into your on-premises Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) Domains.

This is quite literally huge. One of the great ways this now manifests itself is in the ability to use these identities as the sole method for connecting to a Windows 10 device.

From the Azure AD section of the management portal it is possible to track usage by user / device / application.

In addition the Azure AD Premium reports allow in depth reporting utilising Microsoft’s Machine Learning skills and many years of security experience to pre warn you of any potential security lapses or attempts to breach your carefully crafted user security.

To be honest there are so many ways that Windows 10 will change the workplace that I could not cover them all in one post here.

A short list would include Windows Hello, Device Guard, Microsoft Edge, Windows Update for Business, Cortana, the list is long and exciting.

So during the next few weeks I will be dropping the odd post as to what and why Windows 10 is an absolute must get for consumers, IT Pro’s and enterprise users.

This is without doubt the best windows ever and IT IS Free for the first year for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users!